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New media platforms offer diverse modes of mediation of every day and tourist places and communities. Spatial social media now augment older forms of mediation, partly by enabling contributions from 'ordinary' users, who create and share spatial discourses. This study examines the discursive construction of peripheral places, produced through user-generated content. Employing qualitative methodology, we sample and analyze 1,053 texts, shared on Google Maps in southern regions of Israel. The key conclusions suggest that compared to traditional media discourses depicting peripheral spaces in Israel, the findings demonstrate a shift from homogeneous depictions to more diverse and multilayered ones. Digital affordances result in more actors and stakeholders partaking in discursive construction, including private and institutional local players, visitors and tourists. Theoretical contributions are offered to the field of digital placemaking, by considering the subjective, evaluative and ideological layers that augment geographical data digital maps provide ('bottom-up' perspective), and to the fields of study of marginalized peripheral and rural communities and tourism crisis in peripheral (post-Coronavirus) locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examines the communicative functions that handwriting (mode) and paper (medium) have come to serve in increasingly digital and intermedial environments. The study begins in museums, where handwritten documents are profusely on display nowadays, and where the display affordances and communicative functions of handwriting are productively explored. Three curatorial display strategies are outlined. These are arranged chronologically, and range from traditional displays, where paper documents are presented inside glass cases, through artistic installations, where documents and handwriting are aesthetically simulated, to interactives, where the audiences/users themselves generate documents on-site. Exploring these strategies illuminates the concept of display as an agentic amalgamation of showing and telling, which produces authentic performances of voice-as-participation. These performances facilitate a move from private to public spheres – in museums and online. The study then proceeds to examine public displays of handwritten documents outside museums, specifically on social network sites. It asks whether and how conceptual sensitivities and sensibilities that originated in displays of handwritten artifacts in museums can shed light on the newer communicative functions of paper in digital environments. It also asks what are the intermedial consequences of the juxtaposition of analogue and digital surfaces. The study points at the current resurrection of handwriting and paper. It argues that the popularity of paper and handwriting results from their evolution into ubiquitous resources for display on and off the web, specifically as authentic bearers of voice that index human action and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study takes a situated and material approach to texts and writing practices and examines writing ethnographically as it transpires and displayed in museums. The ethnography highlights the richness and sociality embodied in writing practices as well as the ideological, communal, and ritualistic functions that writing and texts serve in cultural institutions. Specifically, I offer a comparative study of visitor books and similar writing platforms in two Jewish heritage museums in the United States. Extended ethnographic observations of visitors’ writing activities are augmented by analysis of visitors’ texts, which, following Bakhtin, are understood in terms of their addressivity structures or whom they are addressed to. The study shows how visitors’ texts amount to collective contributions that are part of museums’ heritage display, and that visitors become rhetors when their mode of heritage consumption is the production of texts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Teaching qualitative research methods on the one hand, and Martial Arts, on the other, seem to have only little in common: one is academic, and one is not; one is essentially somatic and kinesthetic, and the one is not. Yet during two decades of teaching and practicing both I repeatedly noticed a fruitful interaction between these ‘arts’, which I experienced as exciting embodied insights that shed light on both spheres. In this article I wish to ‘translate’ three concepts used in martial arts pedagogy, specifically in Aikidō, to the teaching of qualitative methods and methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author offers a reflexive recount of an ethnography conducted at a tourist heritage site. Inspired by critical writings on the aesthetics of (social) scientific practices and texts, the author examines ethnographic practices that take place in the conjoined coercive contexts of tourism and national commemoration. A number of affinities between ethnographic, touristic, and commemoration practices are highlighted, and so are the epistemologies on which they rest and types of knowledge(s) that they help produce. These affinities include the role of authenticity and unmediated encounters, collecting and documenting practices, and lastly practices involved in presentation of artifacts (data vs. souvenirs). The narrative account/recount that the author offers involves visual images, and an examination of the technologies that produce and process them. These present the centrality if visuality in both contexts of tourism (photography, gaze, seeing) and contemporary ethnographic practices and the ways that visual images tell and conceal stories concerning the production of knowledge in social science research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a guided walking tour of a formerly Palestinian neighbourhood in Jerusalem and an important battlefield in the 1948 Arab—Israeli War.The paper assumes a critical performance approach to guided tours in examining how through performative guiding, identities, histories and places are (re)constituted. We conceive of performative guiding as a situated event which both takes place in and simultaneously signifies and reconstructs the environment wherein it transpires. The tour we analyse was given by a Jewish-Israeli guide to a Jewish-Israeli audience, and was attended by the first author. The guide’s apparent inclination towards the Israeli and Zionist narrative regarding the story of the neighbourhood is highlighted through an analysis of the commentary given. Through an examination of things said and unsaid, we highlight the dual role of performative guiding: relaying historical information and reaffirming partisan narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]